THE SINK — Tinney Contemporary

Tinney Contemporary is proud to present The Sink, guest curated by Jodi Hays. The exhibition will run from July 6 to August 10, 2024. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, July 6 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. in conjunction with the First Saturday Art Crawl. Stay tuned for information on additional artist talks and other special programming.

The works in this exhibition embody disparate modes of making that are all process-driven in their own right, relying on accumulation of moments, of material, of pigment or studio detritus. These often-invisible processes—reflected in Hays’ focus on dyeing and “pooling” as a curatorial thread—yield works with a certain density.

The Sink gestures to the invisible domestic labor historically demanded of women; to submerging and cleansing (a banal sort of baptism), to the sink as hold-all (“everything but the kitchen sink”), to water pooling and draining; to what Hays aptly calls the “peaks and valleys of labor” (or, put another way, Dish Pit Sisyphus’ proverbial boulder). It points to the processes of staining and dyeing, porousness and dispersion, scouring and binding; to transformation, flux and fluidity.

The exhibition reflects the ambivalence of the domestic sphere: a place that signifies both safety and oppression. The Sink connotes sunken-ness, a depressive-detachment, wreckage lost beneath the surface, visible only when the tides are low: an inescapable past which haunts the present. The works here reckon with these ghosts.

Join the conversation with Tinney Contemporary, Jodi Hays, and the Nashville Pantheon on Instagram: @jodihayspainter, @the_sink_show, @tinneycontemporary

In Memory of Danila Rumold